The History of Phone Phreaking Blog

Document of the Week: The NSA's Phone Phreak Philes

My longest Freedom of Information Act request was with the National Security Agency.  I had requested documents on "phone phreaks" or "phone freaks" and, to my surprise, they had some.  The request took three years to process.  The files all relate to the 1975-1976 incidents described in Exploding The Phone about John "Captain Crunch" Draper, verification (that is, the ability to remotely wiretap a phone using a blue box), and the military's AUTOVON network:

The docs themselves can be found on the Exploding The Phone web site:

• "Phone Freaks Invade AUTOVON", January 30, 1976
• "Phone Freaks Invade Computer Networks", February 6, 1976
• "Phone Freaks Can Invade Your Privacy", February 13, 1976
• "Phone Freak Briefing", March 26, 1976

Sources and Notes: Umber or Indigo Boxes

One of the things I enjoyed the most about writing Exploding The Phone was the research. (Given how long I took to write it, maybe that's obvious.)  A side effect of all that research is that there are a bunch of interesting gems buried in the "Sources and Notes" chapter.  This is one that really tickles me.  It is from chapter 8, "Blue Box Bookies", and concerns the prosecution of Kenneth Hanna for using a blue box, and his novel defense strategy:

Amusingly, Hanna's attorney's argued that Hanna did not have a "blue box" because the box he had was "black with red buttons."  The court was not persuaded: "It is evident that the term 'blue box' is nominative rather than descriptive, that it, it is the term by which the device is commonly known and, except by accident, has no reference to its actual color. [...]  Implicit in this is the fact that whether blue, black with red buttons, red with black buttons, umber or indigo, the device is still called a 'blue box.'"  United States v. Hanna and Modell

I will try to dig out some other gems from the Sourcers and Notes chapter and post them here.

The Bell System 1A Whistle

In Exploding The Phone I wrote about pioneer phone phreak David Condon who modified a Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute to generate the 1,000 Hz tone -- modulated by a 20 Hz warble -- that was used as the "ring forward" signal on certain long-distance circuits back in the 1950s.

Turns out: the Bell System had their own version of this whisle!  Made of metal, not plastic:

In the very best creative naming traditions of the Bell System it was called the "1A Whistle" and it generated the same "thousand by twenty" ring forward tone.  It was used by technicians in the field to send a ringing signal to terminating offices.

More on the 1000/20 signal can be found here, including audio of what it sounded like.  (On the linked page, scroll down to the "Ringer-Oscillator" photo and click on the image to listen to it.)

Thanks to the Yahoo "coldwarcomms" group member Ozob for bringing this to my attention and to Paul Wills of the telephonecollectors.org web site for posting the photo and audio files.